A Marathon day

Today a few other agorapparatchiks and I walked to Victoria Station - yes, Athens has one too - and got on a regional bus to Marathon. This is where about 10 000 Athenian faced up to around 30 000 Persian invaders in the year 490 BC, sending them scurrying back to their ships. Those 'barbarians' who were still alive then used those ships to sail around the tip of Attica (which juts out into the Aegean) with the aim of making a second, more direct attempt on Athens itself. According to the historian Herodotus, the Athenian soldiers, exhausted from battle, nonetheless rushed all the way back to Athens just in time to dissuade the Persians from trying to land again.

Before looking at a modern map of Attica, it had seemed to me to be a good idea to try to make this historic walk, as the classicist and soldier N.G.L. Hammond did in the 1950s. Unfortunately the spread of modern Athens has by now turned most of that walk into a dreary procession through concrete suburbs, so I thought we might walk from Marathon to Rhamnous instead. But when we got up to Marathon we realized that we had better get a taxi to the site; Greek archaeological sites and museums close at 3pm, and it was already past noon.

Rhamnous was one of over 100 'demes', or villages, which were constituent parts of the classical Athenian state. Being enrolled in a deme was what granted you Athenian citizenship; this in turn entitled you to having your name entered for service in the Council, and also gave you the right to attend and vote in the popular Assembly, Athens' sovereign decision-making body. The site of Rhamnous is stunning - a cluster of ancient houses set against the sparkling Aegean, with the island of Euboea stretching out under the sun in the distance.

Whether any of the demes' ancient inhabitants actually walked all the way to Athens to participate in the Assembly's debates and decisions has been doubted by some historians, and now I know why. All I did in the end was walk back from Rhamnous to Marathon, and that took me around three hours of hiking in the unforgiving Mediterranean sun. Walking from Rhamnous (admittedly one of the more distant demes) to Athens would have taken about a day, and it seems unlikely that your average farmer have given up two days' work for the return journey, even after citizens who attended the Assembly started being given a small stipend by the state in the 390s BC.

It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the battle of Marathon in the Athenian imaginary and in subsequent Western culture. Ancient sources tell us that in the epitaph of Aeschylus, usually considered among the greatest playwrights in history, there was no mention of any of his tragedies; the way he chose to be remembered instead was as a citizen who fought at Marathon. John Stuart Mill in the 19th century rather bizarrely claimed that Marathon was a more important event in British history than the battle of Hastings. Though I've seen the battlefield before, I skipped it today; it was already 6pm, and I was tired from my trek through the countryside. Unworthy, perhaps, of the ancestors I have chosen for myself, I bought a cold drink and waited for the air-conditioned bus to come.